U.S. Museum to Return Ramses I Mummy to Egypt

"Don't be deceived by the fact that he was king for just two years," said Gibson, who is president of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. "Prior to claiming the throne, he was the vizier of Egypt, the equivalent of a prime minister today."

His official title before becoming king was Master of Horse, Commander of the Fortress, Controller of the Nile Mouth, Charioteer of His Majesty, King's Envoy to Every Foreign Land, Royal Scribe, Colonel, and General of the Lord of the Two Lands.

Ramses, who was known as Paramessu before he claimed the throne, worked closely with Horemheb, the king who preceded him, to restore law and order to a country that had been torn apart by ill-conceived religious reforms.

"Tutankhamen's father, Akhenaten, created horrible suffering and economic dislocation; the country was a real mess," said Gibson. "It was almost like Iraq today; they had to appoint judges, reestablish law and order. Horemheb and Ramses were instrumental in getting the country back into a position where future kings could start building beautiful monuments and fighting wars to successfully defend or expand their borders."

Upon his death, Ramses I was carefully prepared for his arduous journey in the after world, mummified, and buried in the Valley of the Kings around 1290 B.C. But he was not left in peace.

During periods of civil unrest and civic corruption, the tombs were victims of almost unfettered grave-robbing. To protect the mummies, if not the grave goods, many of the tombs were opened and the bodies of the kings and other royals moved to more secure, secret locations. Around 900 B.C., many were laid to rest in a hidden tomb in the cliffs of Deir el-Bahri.

Grave Robbers and Tourists

Sometime in the mid-1800s, the tomb at Deir el-Bahri was accidentally discovered by Ahmed Abd el-Rassul while he searched for a lost goat. He and his family, who were widely known at the time as "tomb breakers and mummy snatchers," began selling off mummies, coffins, and royal artifacts to tourists and collectors. They were eventually caught and the tomb was officially discovered in 1881. At the time of its official discovery, the tomb contained 40 mummies, coffins, and other artifacts. Ramses I's coffin was found, but there was no sign of his mummy.

Though the trail of stolen antiquities is often murky, ancient records from the tombs, diaries and letters from the mid-19th century, and scholarly conjecture suggest that the mummy was sold for seven pounds to a physician from Canada named James Douglas in around 1860. Douglas acquired the royal mummy for the owner of a museum in Niagara Falls.

Over the next 140 years the royal mummy, along with several others, some coffins, and other Egyptian artifacts shared floor space with "freaks of nature"the two-headed calf, and the five-legged pigmemorabilia of the Wild West and the Civil War, and the barrels of Falls daredevils. The museum changed hands, and crossed and re-crossed the Canadian border several times until it closed in 1999.

The Carlos Museum purchased the Egyptian collection for around U.S. $2 million

Identifying a Royal Mummy

Rumors that the Niagara Falls collection included a royal mummy had swirled since the 1980s, when German Egyptologist Arne Eggebrecht visited the museum and visually examined it.

"Anyone looking at the mummy, at least any Egyptologist, could see that this was a powerful man, a fine looking man, and special," said Gibson, who first saw the mummy 18 years ago. "But until the radiocarbon dating came in, giving us a 3,000-year-old date, no one imagined it might be Ramses I."

When the mummy reached Atlanta, scientists at Emory University, which is affiliated with the Carlos museum, swung into a full-on investigation. CT scans, x-rays, radiocarbon dating, computer imaging, and other techniques were all used to narrow the identification.

"Most scholars agree that the Ramses I identification is the most likely," said the Carlos Museum's Peter Lacovara. "All the different lines of investigation converge to make it the most probable."

One indication that the mummy is royal is the position of the arms, which are crossed high across the chest, "a position reserved for royalty until about 600 B.C. or later," Lacovara said.

The quality of the mummification, the position of the embalming scar, its remarkably well-preserved condition, and other factors all place it in the time frame of Ramses' rule, he said.

The physical resemblance to Seti I, and Ramses the Great is also startling, according to many scholars.

"It's definitely a royal mummy," said Zahi Hawass. "I only saw it half an hour ago, so more than that I can't say. But we are very happy it will be returned to Egypt where the rest of the royal mummies are."

Hawass is similarly thrilled to be returning to Egypt with the fragments from Seti's tomb.

"The pieces are small, but they are very important," he said. "The museum is completely volunteering these fragments as a gift to the Supreme Council of Antiquities. They were obtained legitimately and we had no legal claim to them. It's a wonderful gift and I hope other museums will follow this example. I cannot imagine missing parts of tombs on view in museums when the original tombs are left incomplete."